First off, your generous support and unwavering dedication to Axle has finally allowed us to set a release date for Android!

We are pleased to inform you that Axle will be available to download on your Android devices starting on August 17!

We will provide you with more information regarding how to redeem your free copy as we get closer to release. For those of you with iOS devices, don't worry, we will be releasing Axle on that platform shortly after.

Secondly, Axle has been nominated for Best Video Game by the Geekie Awards!Listed alongside us are Don't Starve, Octodad: The Dadliest Catch, The Banner Saga, and Outlast!

Tune in online on August 17 as our team walks down the red carpet at the Geekie Award Ceremony. We could not have gotten here without you!

We have also been invited to attend Gam3rCon in San Diego as both a panelist and an exhibitor. We will be at the convention from July 24 to July 27showing off Axle. Come say hi if you're able to drop by!

Thank you again for your support. We are excited to share our hard work with you so soon!

If you know of any festivals, conventions, or competitions you would like to see Axle at, please send us an email at support@fallstreakstudio.com!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at support@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

We've had our noses to the grindstone these past few weeks, gearing up for festivals as we tighten levels and stomp bugs for a fun and polished game.

Along with that we have been creating more art from the world of Axle.

One of the major things we have been working on is our story scenes that will appear between levels. I don't want to spoil any surprise, so we won't be sharing a lot, but below you can see one some of our rough drafts!

We have also been creating visual representations of all of our levels in the form of adorable little icons for our level select screen! This way we show what clockwork item Axle will need to repair next rather than saying it.

Below are our levels for the first world, the Toyshop. Can you guess what they are?

You can look forward to seeing these and more in our Art of Axle book, which will be shipped with our second round of rewards!

If you know of any festivals, conventions, or competitions you would like to see Axle at, please send us an email at support@fallstreakstudio.com to let us know where!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at support@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are having a great new year!

We on the Axle team have been hard at work getting all the content into the game. At this point our structure and tools are in place, and we have been focusing our efforts on levels and art.

Since the last update we have:

Concepted all the cutscenes for the game. Over the next few weeks we will be pushing those to a final form that can go in between our levels to tell the story of Axle. We have been holding onto this along with all our other artwork and sketches to include into the art book when we ship our final round of rewards.

On a similar note, we have shipped all of our first round of rewards (posters, coasters, tees, stickers, pins, and thank you cards). If you have not received yours yet, please let us know by sending an email to support@fallstreakstudio.com and we will make sure to work that out with you.

Our composer, Adam, has finalized his music for the Factory world and composed a new piece for the Estate. Everything is extremely catchy, we cannot wait to share it with you in the game and soundtrack!

We are two levels away to having full progression for the entire game. Which means that once we complete those last two, Axle will play like a complete game; you can start at level one and play through to the end! Pretty exciting!

Being so close to having everything in the game, we have begun to focus our efforts on finding bugs. We have not run into anything progression-breaking or game-crashing (we spent a lot of time earlier this year working those out) so from here the focus will really be on delivering a polished game to you guys!

Thank you all so much for your continued support and enthusiasm for Axle! We cannot wait to get the game to you!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at support@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

First and foremost, a huge "Thank you!" to all of you that gave us your thoughts and feelings on the beta level of Axle. We cannot express how extraordinarily helpful your feedback has been and we have spent the last few months incorporating your insightful critiques, thoughts, and comments into Axle to make it the best game it can be. We were thrilled to see that there was such an astoundingly positive response to the game so far--thank you for your kind words and continued support. It is truly motivating and encouraging to hear that you are enjoying Axle!

If you still have anything you would like to share on the Axle beta, please send it our way! Every bit of feedback helps us bring you a better game! Once again, you can fill out this form, or send an email to support@fallstreakstudio.com with your thoughts on the beta!

Recently, in the land of game design we have:

Designed more levels, including a train and a power station. We're getting very close to having the first draft of all of our levels done; we only have a few more left! Once we have everything in we will go through a phase of testing and revising, but we are getting close!

Finished the store user interface. We are now working to make sure that all the cool powerups and other accessories you can buy there with your watts work in the game.

Our amazing composer, Adam, finished our music for the factory world. He's also put together a first draft for the Estate world. As usual, it is stuck in everyone's head on the Axle team!

We are just about done with our system that allows you to share scores with friends!

Rewards:We've got some fun new things on the reward front as well. By now we have received our first phase of rewards from their various manufacturers (all the items that are not game-content dependent, like the soundtrack and art book. We'll be sending those out later, don't fear!) and are preparing a packaging party this weekend to send them all to you! We've also started getting in some of the fun higher tier items together.

Here is the custom Axle fabric print that will be going into our Axle ties and bow ties.

And here is our first Axle plushie! We'll be making a few more of these guys.

Here on the Axle team we have hugged many plushies and we are happy to announce that this is probably one of the most hug-able plushies ever.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at support@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

It's been a while but we've been up to a lot! Everything from textures toTEDx Talks, but we're pleased to have something to show for it!

As we near our deadline for our backer beta release of the Android version of Axle more and more pieces fall into place.

Since we last updated we have been focusing on getting Axle to run smoothly across the different devices we test it on. This was one of the biggest unexpected challenges we have come up against. After we transferred Axle to unity we discovered that it would run at an uneven frame rate on some phones, which, as one can imagine, makes playing a bit more of a challenge than we would like. There are so many types of android devices, it can be fairly difficult and time consuming to try and account for each of their eccentricities. It has taken a while, but the investment of time was well worth it. The good news is all our optimization work has paid off and Axle now runs on most slower/older devices! Hooray!

Additionally, you can (or will be able to when we release Axle) post your scores to facebook!Up next are features like inviting friends to play and sharing scores across leader boards. Those features will be finished within the next few days.

In addition we have:

Reworked our score and pause screens to simplify them to be more easy to read and use.

A new set of sound effects for the newer features we have added to Axle, as well as some specific ambiance for the Toy Shop world.

Clarified our tutorial and UI - everything should be easier to understand now!

Worked more on our in-game store. We're getting close to finishing with that.

Made new drafts of our levels to make them as fun and as rewarding as possible as we continue to add more.

Added more vfx!

Fixed bugs and continued to polish the game to look and run even better!

Finalized art for the toyshop world is now in place, and for the first time Axle now has parallaxing layers and landmarks to really give the world depth and bring it to life.

We figured the best way to let you know what is new on Axle would be to show you!Check out the video of our new textures and gameplay below!Since we last shared footage there is now new music, new user interface, and new art as well as some less visible changes. We can't wait for you to play our beta of Axle so we will be working hard to get that to you as soon as possible!

Since we've last updated the Axle team has been hard at workputting together the beta level to send out to our backers to help us test.

Within the past few weeks we have focused on getting Axle working on the wide range of Android devices that are out there.

(One of our half-cogged gears for the Adventure levels!)

In this time we have also:

Set up our menus to work on various devices with a wide range of aspect ratios

Worked on Facebook integration and leader boards to allow you to share scores between friends

Tweaked controller physics so the game is easier to control and Axle's movement feels more natural.

More level revisions!

Usability testing

Added landmarks into levels - you can now see larger machine parts behind gears. This really helps the levels feel more like machines with pieces that work together. (We'll see if we can get some screenshots to share soon!)

Sound! We're currently in the process of putting our sound effects into levels to bring the game to life.

In other news, a few of our backer rewards have arrived. They're looking pretty good!

We shared on Facebook the coasters for the $250 reward, and here they are again:

Last week we were at GDC (San Francisco's Game Developers Conference). As always it was an amazing experience and a great opportunity to say hi to old friends and meet new ones.

It was truly inspiring to see so many innovative, fun, and beautiful indie games that are in production or have been recently released. Talking to other indie mobile developers was a fantastic experience and made it clear that there are many other people going through the same things we are. GDC was a welcomed break that left us refreshed and more passionate than ever to finish Axle and show it to the world.

The current alpha Axle build that we were showing around at GDC was extremely well received by everyone that played it. It was also good to get some more solid play testing at this stage in production. Some of our system iteration has finally paid off, and one or two designs are headed back to the drawing board- because we want to make Axle as good as it can possibly be.

What's New: As for progress on Axle, we just keep rolling content out!Since you last heard from us we have:

Put together a system to create parallaxing backgrounds so that we can give our worlds some depth. We're currently in the process of painting those and assembling them.

Finished a first draft on some more levels! (You'll see this one a lot in updates, we've got quite a few levels each a part of a unique machine with different obstacles and hazards)

Made revisions moving towards a final draft on our music.

Started testing the build of our game on different mobile devices.

Finished cutscene system implementation

Finished the tutorial

Added more particle effects. Because fire, electricity, and explosions make everything cooler, and easier to see on a small phone screen.

Here is what the vfx for a checkpoint will look like. When you reach a checkpoint, Axle will push until he can get the gears turning and power up the next part of the machine. (We will be doing another art pass on the checkpoint structure itself, and the gears will turn with you, but we wanted to show off the lightning!)

Production Schedule: Making a game, especially one unique and robust as Axle, takes quite a bit of time and dedication. Unfortunately we are a bit short on the former. Our small team has to be employed full time in order to pay the rent while we finish up Axle, committing everyone to a tight schedule of nights and weekends. We've accomplished an amazing amount in that time, but it does make production take longer than if we were able to devote our full time to only this game.

While production will not be finished in April, we will be working as hard as ever to get you rewards and finish Axle as soon as possible.

We've come up with a pretty exciting schedule of when you can expect to receive content and rewards from us:

First, once we have received them from the various companies which we ordered them from, you will receive the first round of Rewards. These will include everything but the Soundtrack, Art book, Background Pack, and Beta Party.

Second, once we finish polishing one of our levels that we want to see your response to, we will share with you a section of Axle, a small beta, for you to both sample and help us test.

After that we will be moving towards the end of production on Axle. Once we have a complete soundtrack and all the art done, we will put together our background pack, soundtrack, and art book, and ship them to you.

Finally, once we feel we have a well-tested project that will work on your phones, we will ship the Android version of Axle. Digital copies of the game, watts, etc. will be given out at that time.

After the Android release we will be working on user support and moving towardsreleases for other systems like iPhones, Kindle Fire, Windows 8 phones, the Ouya, and so on. We don't have time estimates for these yet, but rest assured we will keep you updated!

We could not thank each and every one of you enough for your patience and support. All of you have been amazing so far and it has been incredibly motivating to make Axle as fun and amazing as it can be!

As we said earlier, we will continue to keep you updated with progress, rewards, and anything else we feel would be interesting or useful to you.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Hello again Backers and Friends!

In addition to designing and implementing a whole bunch of new levels, the programming and design teams have been hooking up some new features:

We now have a rough draft of our in-game store, which allows you to use the watts you either earn or buy to purchase power-ups, extra lives, and other fun items.

We have some new obstacles and hazards to dodge including electricity that bounces around gears and cogs that disintegrate as you roll across them. The visual effects for these hazards are still in the works, but we'll share some screenshots with you once we have something that looks cool.

There are now first drafts for two new pieces for our soundtrack. We also have first drafts for the sound effects for the first three worlds. And let me say, these first drafts sound amazing.

On top of all that, we have some new gear textures!

We posted this guy from the toyshop levels on our Facebook page a couple weeks ago:

And here is one of the adorably devious little spiked gears from the same world:

Now that we are in a more visual stage of our production, we will be able to share with you more frequent updates to show the new textures, levels, gameplay elements, and anything else that may be fun.

In other news, we recently sent out some backer polls to everyone receiving physical rewards so we can start ordering and preparing them. If you have not responded to your poll yet, please do! The sooner we hear your feedback, the sooner we can order rewards. If you did not get a poll, it might be because you are not receiving physical rewards. If you feel as though you should have received one however, please let us know!

If you have any additional comments or concerns about your rewards, please feel free to send us a message here on Kickstarter, or to E-mail us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com.

As always, thank you for your support, and feel free to contact us through blog comments,Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or E-Mail us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com!

This past month has been a crazy journey, and we are happy that you were a part of it! We raised $20,357 in 30 days, with the support of 303 backers! Not only did we meet our goal but we went above and beyond it--you guys are amazing! Thank you so much for your support, from your messages, to sharing Axle with your friends, to your donations. Every dollar means a lot, and we could not have gotten where we are without each one of you!

Even though we did not make our $22,000 goal to port Axle to iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Ouya, we still have plans to make Axle multi-platform. Though we cannot release Axle on these platforms at the same time as the Android release around April 2013, we plan on staggering our future releases as we are able to afford them. We did get very close to our $22k goal though, and that does help a lot. What this means is that we are that much closer to affording releases on other platforms, so again, a huge thank you for helping us with a significant step towards this goal!

Just because this Kickstarter campaign is over, does not mean we have forgotten you! We'll be sure to keep you updated on release date information, porting plans, the continuing development of the game, and whatever else we feel is cool enough to share!

We want to keep hearing from you too! Please, always feel free to contact us with your thoughts, concerns, or even just to chat!

Today, we are hosting an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit with our development team! We'll be taking questions about the game, behind-the-scenes, or anything else! If you have any questions or want to chat, we'll be online until around 7pm PST!

DeltaAttack also wrote a great article about Axle, calling out some interesting points about our gameplay!

Thanks to your feedback, we have added a $35 Digital Only Reward Tier. In it, you can get Desktop/Phone Backgrounds, Ad-Free Copy of Axle Game, $15 Worth of Watts, a Virtual Thank You Card, Downloadable Soundtrack and the Digital Behind-the-Scenes Art Book.

Thank you everyone for your continuing support as we enter our final week of fundraising! Thanks to you, we have been making progress towards our stretch goal. With your help, we can reach $22,000, and make Axle multi-platform for everyone!